How to effectively track your marketing campaigns

If you're spending hundreds of dollars per month promoting your business through various marketing channels, you should track the results of all your digital marketing campaigns to understand what you're getting for your money.

In this article I'll show you how to track all your digital marketing campaigns using Google Goals.

What are Google Goals?

Google Goals is a feature inside Google Analytics that allows you to track visitor actions on your website.

A goal can be any action a user can make on your site (lead generation, sales, opt-ins etc) . You can create goals for the following:

Destination - best for tracking opt-ins and sales. A goal is recorded once a customer lands on a specific page (e.g. thank you page, order confirmation screen, contact us page, etc).

Duration - user spends a specific amount of time on your site.

Pages/screens - user visits a specific number of pages on your site.

Event - user takes a specific action on your site (e.g. adds an item to their shopping cart, watches a video, signs up to your newsletter).

Step 1: Setting Up a Google Goal

Goals can be created in Google Analytics by heading to the Admin panel and selecting Goals from the view tab:

For today's example let's assume I want to create a goal to capture lead generations from various Facebook blog posts.

After giving my goal a name (lead generation), I select the Destination type goal slot and hit continue:

For Google to award a user a goal it must be told what to track. In this example, I want the customer to contact us using a contact form. Once they have submitted their question they are sent to a thank you page telling them to expect a response in the next 24 hours.

I've set my destination goal as the URL to the thank you page (www.example.com.au/thank-you), I can also assign the goal a value (how much each action is worth to you):

Filling in the value amount is optional. There is also a funnel option which allows you to track the footsteps a user takes before triggering a goal (but that's a little advanced for today's lesson).

After clicking save, my goal has now saved and activated.

I can view my goal by visiting Admin > Goals of Google Analytics:

Step 2: Creating a URL builder

These links are called URL builders and allow Google Analytics to measure how the individual link performs. For example, if you have a blog post you want to promote on Twitter and Facebook, you can create two URL builders for a single page and measure which platforms performs best.

Step 3: Putting it all together

I've got my goal and URL builder links setup, all I have to do now is to promote my links and track my results.

All URL builder links are put in a special section of Google Analytics, you can find them in: Reporting > Campaigns >All campaigns tab

The image above shows a number of different blog posts boosted on Facebook and the amount of sessions and leads they generated. On the left are names of the campaigns built using a URL builder, and on the right you can see how many leads each link generated.

You can also see the number of total sessions, users and bounce rate generated from each link.

This type of analytical data can help a business identify which blog posts are working, which mediums generate the most actions, which emails are being clicked and much more.

Google Analytics is free to use for all businesses and provides a wealth of analytics about your website and conversions.